A Phantom, Or The Killer?

A prosecutor said Carlos Hernandez didn't exist. But he did, and his MO fit the crime.

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — By the time jurors sat down to decide the fate of Carlos De Luna, there was little to debate.

Though no physical evidence linked him to the fatal stabbing of gas station clerk Wanda Lopez, two eyewitnesses did. One said he observed De Luna outside the station with a knife; the other said he saw him leaving the blood-spattered scene.

Then there was the audio recording of Lopez's 911 call, which gave little clue to the killer's identity but graphically documented the attack and Lopez's frantic screams.

"I had nightmares about it for a long time," one juror, Shirley Bradley, recalled. "That tape had a shock-value effect on us. ... It was a clear-cut case."

Finally, jurors rejected De Luna's testimony that another man, Carlos Hernandez, was the real killer. The lead prosecutor scoffed at De Luna's assertion, calling Hernandez a "phantom."

But the jurors who found De Luna guilty and then sentenced him to death in July 1983, five months after his arrest, didn't hear the whole truth.

Hernandez did exist. Not only was he well-known to police in this Gulf Coast city as a violent felon, but the co-prosecutor at De Luna's trial and the lead detective in the case knew Hernandez too.

Four years earlier, they confronted him when he emerged as a leading suspect in a case they handled together--the murder of another Corpus Christi woman.

Jurors heard none of that information. The prosecutor sat silently as his colleague branded Hernandez a figment of De Luna's imagination.

Yet a Tribune investigation shows that the circumstances of Lopez's murder eerily echo the details of Hernandez's lengthy rap sheet--gas station robberies, knife attacks and several assaults on women.

In 1979, he was arrested as a suspect in the slaying of a woman found strangled in her van, an "X" carved in her back, but was released for lack of evidence.

Two months after Lopez's murder on Feb. 4, 1983, Hernandez was arrested while lurking behind a convenience store. In his pocket was a knife.

And over the next six years, while De Luna waited in vain for his legal appeals to keep him from the execution chamber, Hernandez's list of crimes continued to grow.

A SHORT FUSE

The Hernandez home on Carrizo Street, just a few blocks from Corpus Christi's tired downtown, was in the 1980s a place of drunken arguments and violence, much of it perpetrated by Carlos Hernandez.

"Every time there was a fight, there was blood," recalled Priscilla Jaramillo, one of Hernandez's nieces, who lived in the house for several years. "That home on Carrizo Street was nothing but blood."

The patriarch of the family, Carlos Hernandez Sr., was sent to prison in 1960 on a rape conviction. His eldest son, Carlos Jr., was 5 at the time. After being released, his father never came home.

The matriarch, Fidela Hernandez, took out life insurance on all six of her children, collecting on four. She matter-of-factly describes their fates:

Her youngest son, Efrain, was murdered in 1979. Her eldest daughter, Pauline, died of cancer in 1996. Another son, Javier, was slain in 1997. And then there was Carlos, whom she kicked out of the house when he was 16 because Javier and he fought so much. He died in prison in 1999.

Gerardo Hernandez, 50, the only surviving son, describes their home life this way: "We were not a family. We were dysfunctional in every way."

He fled as a teenager and now lives in California. "I had to get away from them as fast as I could," he said.

Family members portray Carlos Hernandez as a man with a vicious streak, particularly when he was drinking. He had a particular fondness for a knife with a folding lock blade, the kind that killed Lopez. He constantly sharpened it on a whetstone, family members and friends recall, and demonstrated its keenness by shaving hair off his forearms.

"He could pop that sucker out real quick," said Marshall Lester, a Hernandez friend. "He slept with it and everything. He had it with him at all times. . . . And he was real quick about stabbing people. He'd get angry real quick if something didn't go his way."

Hernandez's first major brush with the law came at age 16 when he was found delinquent for drunken driving and negligent homicide. Driving home from a party with his sister and her fiance, he slammed into another car at more than 100 miles an hour, killing the fiance.

In the years to come, his rap sheet grew as he was arrested for sniffing paint, stealing a car and three robberies--all at gas stations.

The robberies got him a 20-year prison sentence at age 18. He served less than six years, and after returning to Corpus Christi in 1978, he held a series of laborer jobs, drank heavily and continued to brawl.

Jon Kelly, an attorney who represented Hernandez in the late 1970s and '80s, said Hernandez was one of the most frightening men he knew. Kelly recalled a time when he mentioned to Hernandez that a client owed him money. Hernandez talked to the man, and the bill was paid.